Free (ISP) IPv6 Deployment in France with 6rd

Some distance from Hawaii, but I thought you might enjoy seeing how other ISPs are deploying IPv6. Free.fr is an ISP in France that has been supplying IPv6 to its customers since 2007. Whether it is xDSL or Fibre, the legacy deployment is via 6rd (or Rapid Deployment) which is an IPv6-in-IPv4 encapsulation method.

What’s interesting about Free’s deployment, is that they use the customer’s globally routable IPv4 address and encode the 32 bits in the IPv6 prefix bits 28-60, leaving the customer with a /60. Typically the 0 network is used for the WAN tunnel (6rd tunnel) and the remaining 15 networks are for the customer to use at their house/small office. There is no DHCPv6-PD.

Free supplies a CPE, but if you want to have more control over your routing, and features, you can use an OpenWrt router. Here’s a how-to on configuring your OpenWrt router for Free.

Bon Appetit!

 

Author: Craig Miller

IPv6 Advocate since 1998